Mitchell David Kapor ( ; born November 1, 1950) is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding

Lotus Lotus may refer to: Plants *Lotus (plant), various botanical taxa commonly known as lotus, particularly: ** ''Lotus'' (genus), a genus of terrestrial plants in the family Fabaceae **Lotus flower, a symbolically important aquatic Asian plant also ...

, where he was instrumental in developing the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. He left Lotus in 1986. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, he co-founded the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ...

, and served as its chairman until 1994. In 2003, Kapor became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes via Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center. Kapor serves on the board of SMASH, a non-profit founded by Klein to help underrepresented scholars hone their STEM knowledge while building the networks and skills for careers in tech and the sciences.

Early life and education

Kapor was born to a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family in

Brooklyn, New York Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, behi ...

, and raised in Freeport, New York on Long Island, where he graduated from high school in 1967. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science in an interdisciplinary major, also attending the Boston-based Beacon College, which had a satellite campus in Washington, D.C. at the time. He began but did not complete a master's degree at the MIT Sloan School of Management but later served on the faculty of the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

and the University of California, Berkeley School of Information.

Career

Lotus

Kapor and his business partner Jonathan Sachs founded Lotus in 1982 with backing from

Ben Rosen Benjamin "Ben" M. Rosen (born March 11, 1933) is the former chairman and former acting chief executive officer of Compaq and a co-founder of Sevin Rosen Funds. Early life Rosen was born to a American Jews, Jewish family in New Orleans, Louisiana ...

. Lotus' first product was presentation software for the Apple II known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. Kapor founded Lotus after leaving his post as head of development at VisiCorp, the distributors of the Visicalc

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in ce ...

, and selling all his rights to VisiPlot and VisiTrend to VisiCorp. Shortly after Kapor left Visi-Corp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program. Even though IBM and VisiCorp had a collaboration agreement whereby Visi-Calc was being shipped simultaneously with the PC, Lotus had a clearly superior product. Lotus released Lotus 1-2-3 on January 26, 1983. The name referred to the three ways the product could be used, as a spreadsheet, graphics package, and database manager. In practice the latter two functions were less often used, but 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet program available. Lotus was almost immediately successful, becoming the world's third largest microcomputer software company in 1983 with $53 million in sales in its first year, compared to its business plan forecast of $1 million in sales. Jerome Want says: :Under founder and CEO Mitch Kapor, Lotus was a company with few rules and fewer internal bureaucratic barriers.... Kapor decided that he was no longer suited to running a company, and

n 1986 N, or n, is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''. History ...

he replaced himself with

Jim Manzi Jim Manzi (born 1951) is the former chairman, president and CEO of Lotus Development Corporation and is currently a private investor in various technology start-up ventures. Early career Manzi received his B.A. in Classics from Colgate University ...

Digital rights activism

Kapor was extensively involved in initiatives that created the modern Internet. He co-founded the

in 1990 and served as its chairman until 1994. EFF defends civil liberties in the digital world and works to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as the use of technology grows. Kapor attended the first Wikimania in 2005.

Investments

Kapor was the founding investor in UUNET, one of the first, and the largest among, early Internet service providers; of Real Networks, the Internet's first streaming media company; and of Linden Lab, maker of the first successful virtual world, Second Life. He was also founding chair of the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX). In 2003, Kapor became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox. Kapor serves on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. In May 2009, after founder

Susan P. Crawford Susan P. Crawford (born February 27, 1963) is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She served as President Barack Obama's Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (2009) and is a columnist f ...

had joined the Obama administration, Kapor took over chairmanship of OneWebDay - the "Earth Day for the internet". In 1996, the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact ...

named him a Museum Fellow "for his development of Lotus 1-2-3, the first major software application for the IBM PC". He founded the Mitchell Kapor Foundation to support his philanthropic interests in environmental health. As an active angel investor, Kapor participated in the initial rounds of Dropcam, Twilio, Asana, Cleanify, and Uber.

Kapor Center and Kapor Capital

Kapor founded the Kapor Center in 2000 as an institution focused on tech inclusion and social impact. The institution's mission is to invest in social and financial capital in vital non-profit organizations. As part of the Kapor Center, Kapor Capital is its venture capital arm. The venture capital firm has been investing since 2011. As of 2018, Kapor Capital has made over 160 investments, primarily in information technology seed stage startups, with a particular focus on diversity. Since 2016, the Kapor Center for Social Impact, Kapor Capital, and ''SMASH'' have been located in the Uptown neighborhood of Oakland, CA.

Diversity in technology

In August 2015, Mitch and Freada announced they would invest $40 million over three years to accelerate their work to make the tech ecosystem more inclusive. In addition to his roles at Kapor Capital and Kapor Center, Mitch currently serves on the board o
SMASH
whose mission is to enhance equal opportunity in education and the workplace, and sits on the advisory board of Generation Investment Management, a firm whose vision is to embed sustainability into the mainstream capital markets.

Personal life

He is married to Freada Kapor Klein and resides in Oakland and Healdsburg,

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

. Both served on the board of trustees of the Summer Science Program from 2004 to 2006. He was a student of the program in 1966.

Awards and honors

*1985 – Golden Plate Award of the

American Academy of Achievement The American Academy of Achievement, colloquially known as the Academy of Achievement, is a non-profit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest achieving individuals in diverse fields and gives them the opportunity to meet o ...

*2003 – Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Norbert Wiener Award *2005 – EFF Pioneer Award *2010 – REDF Inno+prise Award *2015 – Ford Legacy Award *2018 – Elon University Medal for Entrepreneurial Leadership

References

External links

Mitch Kapor's weblog archives

Mitch Kapor's "Why Wikipedia Is the Next Big Thing"

Wikimania 2006 bio

"How to Build a Successful Company"
Kapor speaking at Stanford (podcast & video)
Kapor Center For Social Impact

Kapor Capital
* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Kapor, Mitch 1950 births Living people People from Brooklyn People from Freeport, New York Businesspeople from San Francisco People from Healdsburg, California Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Yale College alumni MIT Sloan School of Management alumni American computer businesspeople 20th-century American Jews Second Life Internet activists Electronic Frontier Foundation people Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board members Mozilla people Summer Science Program American bloggers American technology company founders American chairpersons of corporations Open source advocates 21st-century American Jews